He’s a modern master of the prison movie because Nicolas Winding Refn understands you don’t need bars and brick walls to feel trapped. It’s a state of mind, and once you’ve closed the door behind you, it’s like serving a life sentence in solitary.

Every movie Refn has made works on this principle, from the brilliantly warped story of Britain’s most violent criminal, Bronson, to the hauntingly romantic glow of Drive. The characters in these films were hogtied by their own past, their own ego and a displaced sense of duty.

The same is true of Julian (Ryan Gosling), the central character in Refn’s truly minimalist thriller Only God Forgives.

Picking up various pieces of the character he played in Drive, Gosling cobbles together a complex portrait of a truly conflicted man, but one who prefers to keep his pain deep inside, lest his sensitivity betray his male bravado.

When the film opens, we’re not too sure if he’s even a good guy, or a bad guy. He’s so quiet, he could go either way — and Refn doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to guide us to one side of the moral arena over another.

We’re essentially circling the drain in Bangkok for the duration as Refn executes a slow-motion Greek tragedy with Gosling standing silently at the centre, pacing the prison cell of his own mind.

Joining him in mental jail is a cast of other similarly stuck characters, namely a cutthroat police chief played by martial artist Vithaya Pansringarm, and the truly fear-inspiring Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) — his crime boss mama.

When Julian’s older brother is killed as part of the police chief’s grand moral drama, Crystal demands revenge, and she assigns her youngest boy to slice off the head of the perpetrator and hand it back to her on a platter.

Kristin Scott Thomas is almost unrecognizable in Only God Forgives

Julian was already on top of the job before his mother even arrived in Bangkok, but when he found himself eye to eye with the guilty man, he realized there was more to the saga than he originally understood.

His brother was guilty of brutal sex offences and murdering a young woman. The police chief was merely looking to settle the karmic score by having the girl’s father kill the depraved white molester in return, but Crystal’s arrival throws the balance of power out the window.

She wants revenge and she’s not afraid to use every tool in her girlish toolkit to get it, which means Julian assumes every dimension of Greek tragedy as he struggles to win his mother’s elusive love.

With so much emotional tension writhing beneath the muscular surface, the less said the better because this is about the demons that live inside the mind.

Besides, we’re familiar with the narrative map: Julian has to kill the cop. The cop has to kill Julian, and mom is willing to seduce anyone to get what she craves.

Like the flawless martial arts sequences offered through the stoic police chief, Refn strips it all down to essential movements and archetype.

She wants revenge and she’s not afraid to use every tool in her girlish toolkit to get it.

Unlike his fanboy, action-loving contemporaries, Refn’s violence actually feels violent — though we don’t actually see as much — because he captures the crushing rush of emotion that fuels physical conflict.

In fact, one of the most violent — and oddly funny — scenes involves Kristin Scott Thomas checking into a luxury hotel. Almost unrecognizable in designer shades, long blond hair and collagen-plumped lips, Thomas eviscerates the young check-in clerk with a wave of her manicured fingernail.

It may well be the best entrance of Thomas’s illustrious career, and it proves you don’t need fat brush strokes if the canvas is well composed.

Refn does not let his colours bleed, and by keeping each element contained, the true nature of tragedy emerges through the gaps because it’s the characters that insist on mingling the pigments.

One action didn’t necessarily have to lead to the next, but when someone kills your brother, an endless cycle of violence seems destined to begin. This is why the human species inevitably goes to war, and perpetuates histories based in hate. We need payback.

Refn brings a detached lightness to this rather heavy movie that makes it esthetically compelling, as well as entertaining, by giving us the edges of the canvas. Every action is contained inside a larger frame, and scene by scene, he walks us in a little bit closer.

There are times when the symbolism gets a little blunt — such as the moment where Gosling drags his finger over his mother’s yonic-like wound — but it works as black comedy, and keeps the tone of the movie waffling between a sense of the absurd and all-out existential nihilism.

Only God Forgives hasn’t inspired a whole lot of love in critical circles since its release, and that’s too bad, but there’s no real mystery to the reticence. Refn uses masculine forms without reaffirming masculine code. For instance, he shoots a lot of martial arts action sequences, but he shoots them static and refuses to make them sexy. By the same token he also films various sexual acts, but they feel completely cold and violent.

Refn is going after nothing less than the axis of war: the wounded ego, the family feud and the displaced sense of duty that forces innocents to assume the sins of their ancestors.

Only God Forgives often looks silly and sad, but in Refn’s surreal universe, silly, sad and selfishly stupid is synonymous with artistic success.